Update, October 2026 — One clarification and one development. The $2.5m described here was the IFC’s equity portion of a larger round: Truck Lagbe closed a $4 million Series A, led by the IFC and co-led by IDLC Venture Capital Fund I. What followed is below the original article.
TRUCK LAGBE AT A GLANCE
- IFC invests $2.5m
- Early-stage investments were $1.75m
- Hong Kong-based Mount Parker Ventures and Aria Group are existing investors
- Founded in 2017
- Idea won the 2017 Bangladesh government's award
- Over 40,000 trucks are registered with the app
- 80,000 drivers, owners and customers are registered
- It has 5,000 enterprise customers
- Transportation is 17% cheaper
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector investment arm of the World Bank Group, is investing $2.5 million in Truck Lagbe to support the logistics services of the leading digital trucking platform in Bangladesh.
Sources said the new investment will be used to train drivers, develop technology and expand the service across the country.
According to sources in IFC, Truck Lagbe has played an important role in the supply chain to provide food and essential items during Covid-19. Its services are helping to sustain small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and are also supporting livelihoods in the pandemic.
IFC evaluated all the initiatives of Truck Lagbe before investing in the company.
The multi-national lender said IFC is providing an equity investment of $2.5 million in the company, which connects people and corporate customers with truck owners and drivers through an app and a website. Truck Lagbe is used to book short-haul and long-haul freight trips, with trucks of different sizes.
"One of our big challenges is to train drivers. We will also use this investment in technology development," Anayet Rashid, co-founder and chief executive officer of Truck Lagbe, told when asked about the new investment.
"Cities have so far been our focus. We will now begin work to spread it widely across the country."
According to sources, Truck Lagbe is getting investment from several local financial institutions, but the company declined to provide any information in this regard.
The home-grown platform has already registered around 40,000 vehicles, ranging from small pickup vans to large lorries. It received good responses from an increasing number of individual customers, while more than 5,000 businesses are now taking services offered by Truck Lagbe, said CEO Anayet Rashid.
A total of 80,000 people, including drivers, owners, and customers, have now registered with the app.
Anayet Rashid said competition is created among drivers when a customer wants to rent a truck. The fare determined by the competition is at least 17% lower than the traditional truck fare.
According to sources, 4.25 lakh small and large trucks registered by the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority are operating across the country.
The Hong Kong-based early-stage venture capital firms – Mount Parker Ventures and Aria Group – provided Truck Lagbe with the key portion of $1.75 million in seed investments.
Mount Parker is the investor of Asia's first app-based goods delivery platform GoGoVan, which has already extended its services to over 300 cities and registered 80 lakh drivers under its network.
Aria Group's portfolio includes on-demand-same-day-delivery-service-platform LaLaMove, which has expanded into two dozen markets across Asia and America, including the United States of America.
The concept of Truck Lagbe won a competition organised by the government in 2017. Two Bangladeshi school friends – Anayet Rashid and Mir Hossain Ekram – founded the startup in the same year to offer the first-ever app-based truck hiring services.
Truck Lagbe gained increased popularity after winning the Bangladesh Brand Forum Best Technology Innovation Award in 2018. It first launched services for individual clients for shifting homes within the city and nationwide, and later began to provide enterprise solutions.
Currently, Truck Kothay and Shohoz Truck are competing with Truck Lagbe.
What followed
The round closed at $4 million rather than $2.5 million. The IFC led it and IDLC Venture Capital Fund I co-led, with participation from Millville Opportunities Master Fund, Shorooq Partners, Colopl Next and TRU Fund I. The presence of a domestic venture fund alongside a World Bank Group institution and Gulf and Japanese investors is what makes the round unusual: it is a reasonably standard international Series A syndicate, which was not a common sight for a Bangladeshi startup at the time.
The platform has continued to operate across all 64 districts, with more than 80,000 truck owners and drivers registered.
The number that explains the investment
Transport and logistics is worth roughly $15 billion in Bangladesh, about 6.8% of GDP. That is the figure that makes a trucking marketplace interesting to an investor, and it is a useful corrective to how these businesses are usually described.
A freight-matching platform is not really a technology company solving a technology problem. The inefficiency it addresses is empty running — a lorry that delivers to Chattogram and returns to Dhaka with nothing earns on half its journey while burning fuel on all of it. Matching that return leg to a waiting load is a coordination problem, and coordination problems in a $15bn market are where the margins are.
The reported 17% reduction in transport cost is the same fact stated from the customer's side.
What to watch instead of funding announcements
Marketplaces of this kind are judged on repeat usage by supply, not on registration counts. A driver who takes one load and leaves has been acquired and lost; a driver who takes a return load every week is the business. Registration figures — 80,000 drivers, 40,000 trucks — measure marketing reach, not liquidity.
The second thing to watch is whether ancillary services arrive. Fuel credit, insurance, maintenance financing and payment settlement are where freight platforms in comparable markets have found durable revenue, because a matching fee alone is thin and easy to disintermediate once two parties have each other's numbers.
